Four successful pitch tips

By Debbie Mayo-Smith

Here are four tips to help you achieve a successful outcome with your next sales pitch

Strong opening If you’re pitching a $500,000 contract and have only 10 minutes, ‘good morning ladies and gentlemen, thank you for having us here’ just cost you over $8,300 by wasting 10 seconds. Open differently and strongly. Paint a picture. Take them into the future. Describe how they’re benefiting from the clever decision they made years ago working with you. Decision makers want to benefit the company, they also want personally to be sure they are taking the right action. So highlight how they’ll be remembered for doing the right thing by using your company (not too much of a butter up though)

Answer questions up front, What do they want to know from you? How can you help them? If you’re more expensive, will take longer, are the underdog – do not ignore the fact. They’re thinking it. Come straight out early into the presentation with a “I know what you’re thinking’ statement, then answer their objections.

Premise Build your pitch around the structure of how they will benefit from what you are asking them to do. ‘You will save $2’ million dollars by using our software’, ‘You will cut maintenance expenditure by 20% ‘. Phrase it so they say to themselves ‘how?’ Which you then answer in a logical and structured way.

Strong Close Refer back to your opening story or bring all the elements together describing how they’ll benefit. If you didn’t use the looking into the future in your opening, you can use it in the closing. “picture yourself in two years’ time. It’s the gala dinner. Award night. Everyone is abuzz because the success of the new software system you approved and installed the year before. Five different staff have come to you through out the evening – all award winners from their significant leap in productivity….